Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Furniture Project

By Ethan Brammeier

One of the classes I
am taking this semester is a furniture design class with Stewart Wessel.For our first project we were all
supposed to build the “Red and Blue Chair.”This chair was designed in 1917 as one of the first
explorations by the De Stijl art movement.The original chair was made with unstained beech wood and
was not painted until the early 1920’s.

Part of this project was to have a concept with
our design.My concept focuses on
the joinery of the vertical and horizontal elements of the chair.The original joinery of this chair used
dowels that were hidden once the chair was fully assembled.I decided to change the joinery by
using 3/8” square pegs and exposing them 3/8 of an inch.The square wooden pegs resemble the
horizontal and vertical components of the chair but at a smaller scale
(Fig.1).

I
also used reclaimed lumber from a granary built in the 1960’s.The lumber was used for the granary’s
interior structural wall so it had a lot of nails in it.To express the reclaimed lumber in my
chair I decided to put a natural stain on it, and paint the newer lumber to
match the color of the original chair (Fig.2).I also left several nail holes exposed in the vertical
elements to help show that it was reclaimed lumber.There were only four screws in the entire chair while the
rest was held together by dry-fit pegs.I used a 3/8” mortising chisel bit to make the square holes and I planed
down the reclaimed lumber for the square pegs.The pegs were then painted black to make them stand out from
the vertical and horizontal components.